Over half of the world's refugees are children, the majority of which experience the double jeopardy of losing both their homes and their education.

Promising Practices in Refugee Education (PPIRE) is a joint initiative of Save the Children, UNHCR, and Pearson. Launched in March 2017, the initiative set out to identify, document and promote innovative ways to effectively reach refugee children and young people with quality educational opportunities.

Methods from each chosen organisation were documented in the form of 5,000 word case studies, each recommending lessons for the sector going forward. You can read our case study on low profile education for Rohingya refugee children here. It highlights the need to find alternative solutions to improve the situations of the most vulnerable, and encourages practitioners to work closely with the local refugee communities, with an agile and creative approach.

On the 22nd of September, during the UN General Assembly, the Promising Practices initiative launched a report that synthesises the key findings and lessons learned from across these projects. Both the projects and the experience of implementing partners have been used to identify ten recommendations aimed at improving refugee education policy and practice.

Our Communications and Advocacy Manager, Esther Smitheram went to the event in New York to present on our work with an unregistered Rohingya refugee community.

​She said “We were pleased to contribute to an initiative that is genuinely crowdsourcing information from a wide spectrum of areas and organisations, finding the best education methods for displaced children. Children on the Edge exists to help those children who are out of the spotlight and unreached by the larger agencies, so we welcomed the opportunity to highlight the plight of the Rohingya, especially at this time”.

For Children on the Edge, this Promising Practices initiative comes at a point when the already grim situation for the Rohingya has escalated into a humanitarian catastrophe. Since August 25th, 480,000 Rohingya have fled Myanmar as the army’s campaign of ethnic cleansing and violence reached unprecedented levels.

Children on the Edge are uniquely placed to respond to the current crisis and meet the needs of these most vulnerable refugees. We are already working on the ground with strong local partnerships, and have been for over 7 years. Our partners are best situated to provide support to unreached refugees through their skills, experience and networks.

In the first stage, we are appealing to raise funds to provide essentials such as rice, clean water, latrines and tarpaulin along with cash transfers to new arrivals for household essentials in the most unreached areas.

​As this is an ongoing humanitarian emergency that will stretch beyond 2018, in January we aim to create a number of safe spaces for Rohingya children that have arrived over this time. These safe spaces will be child-friendly environments, where severely traumatised children can go to re-establish a sense of normalcy, through a daily routine with trained and trusted adults. Here they can play, learn, receive a nutritious snack each day and begin to process what they have been through.